As a rule, women have way better game than guys. They do things naturally that most guys would never even think to do. One of the best assets on a girl is the Power Move Breakup.

Women absolutely love to try to take your power as a man in a relationship. That’s why they constantly test you. The problem, of course, is that as much as they try to take your power, they don’t want you to ever give it to them. When you do, they quickly lose interest. One of the best tools that women use to try to take your power is the Power Move Breakup.

Women love the PMB (TM). It’s a great way for them to remind themselves that they are in control of the relationship and as much as you pretend to be the man, you’re really just a pawn in their game of chess. This weekend, I pulled a reversal on Rian and broke up with her. Now, what makes this a PMB versus just a straight up dumping is that I fully expect to get back together with her. I just need her to prove to me that she wants it. She has until I fall in love again to do so.

I know our relationship seems complicated and dysfunctional, but that is only because there’s an important part of the story which I don’t share on this blog because it’s too personal for even anonymous readers to see. Suffice it to say that there is one thing that is really pissing me off about our relationship and I need it to change in order for us to get back together. I do truly love her, so this has definitely been painful for me, but I’ve initiated my get over her process (which I’ll write a post about soon) so that it doesn’t hurt as badly. An important step in this process of course, is being single and on the make again. To do that I’ve hit up the girls who I had previously cut off when I went exclusive with Rian, some of whom were no goes, but a couple of whom were still possibilities. I’ve also jumped back onto Match and begun running game. I’m not going to do very much documenting of my escapades, but if something interesting and insightful comes up, I’ll be sure to share it.

I missed betting last week because of some gambling website issues. As I had mentioned before, Oddsmaker was having bandwidth issue which were really irritating me. They claim to be updagrading their site, but I don’t have the time for that. Also, Bodog, which I’ve switched to, has substantially more betting options, including live betting, which I might try out tomorrow. I am not in love with the betting interface, but if you are looking to get in on some action, I definitely recommend checking out Bodoglife.com.

The issues I was having were associated with getting my money into Bodog’s site. Most credit cards do not play well with gambling sites, and while I was able to use my check card to deposit money into Oddsmaker after none of my credit cards worked, this did not work with bodog. I ended up having to create an eWalletXpress account and transfering the money in that way. Unfortunately, it took a week for my checking account info to get verified, but now that it is I have smooth sailing from here on out.

Oddsmaker charged me $25 for taking my money out, which makes me want to hit them. They allow you to make 1 free withdrawl per month of $1000 or more, but since that didn’t apply in this scenario I had to pay. I would have been really upset about it if I hadn’t been leaving them up $120 or so. Bodog also charges, but they give you 1 free withdrawl per month with no cap on the amount.

It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t bet last week considering what happened in the games. There’s a good chance I would have gone broke with all the upsets. This has been an incredibly interesting season so far and it seems to get moreso every week.

Anyway, here are my bets for the week:

$55 Browns/Redskins over 42

$55 Saints/Panthers over 45

$55 Chargers over Bills (made me sad to do since the Bills are my team)

$50 Parlay This is a bet that was not available on Oddsmaker. It’s a straight Parlay which pays out +250.

Since this morning when I received my daily email from Thrillist, I have been totally GEEKING OUT! One of the emails was a review of a product called YouMail; a product which I fully expect to change my life forever (or at least until it finds its way into the deadpool).

There are a bunch of uber-awesome features in this FREE service:

1. Custom greetings – You can set a custom greeting for every person on your contact list if you want to. It gives that personal touch to your phone. It also allows you to differentiate business contacts from personal.

2. Visual voicemail on their website – You have an inbox on their website which allows you to look at each voicemail you receive including, who it’s from, and the ability to listen to it in the built in flash player.

3. Email and text notification of messages – No more need to call your voicemail and pull your hair out listening to the menus. The message is emailed to you in mp3 format along with a notification via text message. You can forward this file as you wish, listen back for phone numbers, skip through as necessary, etc. Having these messages in your email allows you for better organize, which is absolutely essential for anyone trying to serial date or manage multiple relationships.

4. Message Transcriptions (in beta) – Transcriptions are included in the email with if you enable this feature, allowing you to sync with outlook calender and tasks. In addition, you can have the transcription included in the text message (up to four text messages long) for convenience. No more, “if possible, please send me a text rather than leaving a message” in the greeting.

6. Mobile Web – Access to your voicemail on your smart-phone through the mobile version of the site. This feature was, in my mind, one of the killer features on the iPhone, and it has now been one-upped and made available on any smartphone for anyone who wants it. A launch of applications for the various smart-phones might be even better, but the interface is very convenient and user friendly.

Basically I think this is totally awesome, and can make anyone’s phone life easier. I look forward to getting a ridiculous amount of utility from this service for as long as I can. I recommend that everyone try this out, and fall in love with it as I have.

People love to knock online dating. The Dateable Dork (before her blog came down) likened it to dumpster diving. In conversations on the TSB Man Transformation Weekend, Lance (of Honey and Lance) and Mike Stout (of TSB magazine) agreed that the caliber of women that one will find online are sub-par. Lance even went as far as to say that the sex is substantially better off of cold approaches.

I couldn’t disagree more with this assessment of online dating. Granted, it’s my specialty, so I’m a little biased. And while I consider myself an online dating expert, I’m relatively average at night time co approach (although I’m pretty good at day game, mostly because I turn it into text game which is what makes online dating my specialty to begin with). Still, I think that despite my bias, I can still make a great case for why online dating is a great way to meet people regardless of what you’re looking for.

Those of you who have seen the relatively extensive list of traits that I look for in a mate know that I am veriy picky. So how am I going to find a smart, funny, gorgeous, bubbly woman with a positive attitude and high ambitions online? I mean, everyone knows that the only people who go online are overweight ditzes who used to be hot and never got a chance to develop their social skills, right? Wrong! In my experience, online dating is a cross-section of the world.

Look, there are definitely going to be some of those women who you look at when you meet them and you say to yourself, “Oh, so that’s why you’re on match.” But there are also a seemingly infinite number of beautiful, brilliant women who for varying reasons ended up on a dating website like Match.com, particularly in a big city like New York. Granted, these women get inundated with emails, so getting their attention can be tricky, but if you can make that work, you can definitely meet your dream girl. Hell, you can meet 10 of her.

I think that part of the negativity that Lance and Mike have toward women they meet online has to do with the generic nature of all of nearly all female profiles which result in the boys coming into the interactions with judgements as a result. Sure, a profile telling me that she “love[s] to laugh” annoys the hell out of me as much as anyone, but there’s really no use in wasting mental energy over it, because when it comes down to it, women don’t need much written in their profile to get attention. That’s the main reason that I don’t really read a woman’s profile thoroughly, but rather just scan it for key traits that I want to include in my email to her like spontaneous, intellectual, intelligent, smart, ambitious, adventurous, loves new experiences to name a few. No matter how good you are at online game, you’re probably not going to get much more than a 20% response rate (which adds up really quickly btw), so I focus on screening the personality of women afterward on instant messenger (saves me the time of meeting up with most of the lame ones, and gives me the opportunity to talk to 3+ at once while working my text game).

I’ll definitely talk more about online dating on this blog, particularly if I ever have to go back onto the market, but if anyone has any pressing questions for me, feel free to shoot me an email at hammer86blog@gmail.com.

Over the last few days, as I’ve sat at my desk at work monitoring the financial news on my twitter feed, I have become more and more hungry for some financial markets action. I am absolutely salivating over the clearance sale in tech on wall street these days. But at the same time, I’m very afraid to jump in without any signs of stability in the near future.

This techcrunch article lays out an interesting discussion of how low Google’s stock can go. I look at the stocks of Google, Amazon and Apple and see a real chance for value investors to jump in and make a killing. I want to talk about Google in particular because I am very close to buying a few grand of stock in this particular company. This is a company which has had its market cap drop to $120 billion from twice that. Google is going to have $20 billion in revenues this year at nearly 100% margins. Why does it have a revenue multiple comparable to what we would expect from a manufacturer such as General Electric or Ford?

Google is a sure thing. Their balance sheet is so strong right now. Sure there will be less money going into advertising in general, but I’m thinking that there might even be a possibility that online advertising will be the equivalent of an inferior good in classical economics in that the more advertising budgets decrease the more appealing cheaper forms of advertising become. But the point is, Google has so many things going on right now, and they have a lock on search advertising (particularly after this Yahoo deal goes through), so I really do think that they’re going to continue to keep hitting revenue projections. And since they might as well be printing cash, they are not going to be directly effected by credit markets.

So I’ve pretty much made my decision. Now the question is, when do I buy? How low will Google go? I’m thinking $250-275. What do you guys think? Prospecting going on at the end of the trading day over the last few declines have kept the prices higher than they otherwise would be, so now is not right yet. I want to look for some sense of consistency in the price over a couple of days before I jump in, but I’m afraid that it’s going to jump quickly when it does. Should I just buy now to avoid missing it?

Those of you who read my previous post on this situation may be curious as to how I resolved it. I don’t have all the answers, but here’s my best attempt at an explanation.

One thing that you have to understand is that the line between love and hate is very thin. When you feel emotions for someone, those emotions can very easily be converted back and forth. People think that love and hate are opposites, when in fact the opposite of both love and hate is indifference. My girlfriend kept telling me that she hated me during the situation, and while that’s obviously painful for me to hear, in the back of my mind it was always a sign that there’s still a chance.

One thing that never happened during her period of anger was she never ignored my calls and text messages. As angry as she was, she never decided, fuck him, I’m going to make him suffer. If that were to happen, as a guy you have to just give her space and take your mind off of it. When you do start talking to her again, you have to just make sure that you act as if this never happened, not necessarily ignoring the conversation, but at least with your voice tonality.

Anyway, since she continued to talk to me during the situation, it was easier to talk her through it. I think part of the moral of the story is that love conquers all, and even though she was angry at me and thought that I was up to shenanigans, she still had feelings and so it was never really dead. The only thing that I had to convince her of was that I really do love her and care about her, which plays directly into trusting me. The trick to this is to be honest (as usual). I made it clear that I was sorry that I made her feel like she can’t trust me by messaging other women when I thought it was over, but I do not believe that what I did was wrong although I wouldn’t do it again because my feelings for her are much stronger now than the were. I also made it clear that the thing about me talking to her friend is totally fabricated and while I would understand her being so upset if it were true, it clearly isn’t and so it’s really something that I can’t apologize for.

Clearly saying this once is not going to make it better, but by saying it multiple times in different ways with time helps. There were two other things I did in the meantime as well. First, I sprinkled in anecdotal stories tangentally related that were filled with emotion to rebuild/amplify that connection. Second, from time to time I had her articulate exactly what was bothering her to me, and then deal with the specific issues in a logical way as they come up. It is incredible how powerful it can be when you have someone vocalize their concerns, problems, to-do’s, etc. When these things are kept pent up in ones mind, they build on themselves and seem impossible to get past. When you get them out, they seem much more manageable.

Alright guys, I’m hurting big time from last week, so lets see how well I recover. I feel much better about my bets this week, although I’m in major jeopardy of dipping below my initial investment of $330. I am very excited to have an opportunity to feel really good about putting my money on the Bills, the only real New York team! Just so we’re clear, as usual I will probably make a couple more over/under bets as the games approach, but for now these are my bets:

$110 Bills over Arizona 0 spread -110 odds. Is this a joke? The 2-2 Cardinals facing off against my 4-0 Bills and they aren’t even being given points? I was offended when I saw this spread. So offended in fact, that I decided that I need to take full advantage of it. Granted the Bills have, with the exception of Jacksonville, only beaten bunk teams. But the Cardinals have only beaten bad teams as well, and they got pounded by a mediocre Jets team!

$55 Ravens over Titans 0 spread at +220 odds. I don’t know why the bookies seem to think that the Ravens are going to lose this game after coming off a huge win over Pittsburg, but for some reason they are making the Titans a favorite, which to me is absolute nonsense when the Ravens are probably the best team in the AFC.